One of my favourite songs by gospel icon Sfiso Ncwane is entitled Kulungile Baba. You may know it? It’s a firm fan favourite. But as I walked into the Grace Bible Church in Soweto on Friday morning, the words of the song stirred deep inside my heart.

A new app has been launched to help people conquer the fear of flying by providing cold hard stats on the unlikeness that their flight will crash.

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Though the app is meant to help calm nerves among those who suffer from a phobia of flying, its name is, perhaps, not very reassuring.

“Am I Going Down?” works by crunching the numbers.

After providing all the flight information necessary -- type of aircraft, departing and arriving airports, and airline -- the app crunches raw data and crash statistics from a variety of different sources (International Civil Aviation Organization and National Transportation Safety Board in the US) before giving users their odds of crashing.

Crash statistics are incorporated with the number of fatalities and volume of flights, and weighted against data over the last decade.

The release of the app comes after a particularly deadly year in aviation history, with the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines MH370, and the crash of AirAsia QZ8501.

Developed by husband and wife team Nic Johns and Julie Postlethwaite of Vanilla Pixel, the app was the product of Postlethwaite’s own fear of flying.

Other apps developed to help calm nerves include Valk, which provides breathing and relaxation exercises, and Soar, which helps flyers anticipate turbulence by providing weather information and turbulence forecasts.